"I'm not saying she was very silly, but one of us was silly and it wasn't me."

[skywriter86]

That's one of my favorite lines from the BBC period drama "Wives & Daughters." That miniseries was the subject for my first participation in the icons community icons100 (if you want to check out the whole set, then click here, and if you want to check out my banner, then click here and go to the Special Categories section at the bottom).

When deciding upon a subject for my first attempt at 100 icons, I wanted something that I enjoyed (of course), and I also kept in mind the 50 assigned themes that I had to cover within my 100 icons. I wanted something versatile enough to cover all those topics.

After narrowing down the list (which all consisted of period dramas, BTW), I decided on "Wives & Daughters" for a few reasons:

• It's 301 minutes long and divided into four parts, and within that time frame, there's humor, drama, tragedy, romance and the seemingly ordinary moments of life (at least life during that time period, though there definitely are universal themes): All in all, there's a lot to work with.
  
• No one else at the community had done it before, and I notice in general that there are less graphics for this compared with some heavyweight period dramas, such as Pride & Prejudice and North & South. This leads to another point...
  
• ...while I think it's somewhat under-appreciated, it's still one of my favorite period dramas (definitely in my top 5), and I would rank it up there with P&P and N&S. My favorite character is the protagonist Molly Gibson, who was played subtly and wonderfully by Justine Waddell (while I chose the general minseries for my subject, instead of focusing on a particular character, the most popular character featured in my icons was Molly). As much as I appreciate lively, outspoken heroines such as P&P's Lizzy, I could connect and relate to Molly and her introverted personality. During W&D, I definitely felt (and even shed some tears) for her. Plus, she is strong in her own way.
  

I completed the first 50 icons relatively fast in January while I was still on break before the semester began at my university. After the semester began, though, I was pretty busy and just didn't make time to finish it off. In fact, I barely made graphics at all (you'll see those in another post ;-) ) until this past week. I had to ask for an extension, and during last week, which was my spring break, I realized that my deadline (March 30) was coming up really soon (I actually made about 45 icons within 3 days O_O).

Here are some random tidbits about the icons themselves:

• Best intentions: I had wanted to post 4 separate batches, instead of 3, but I made the last half of the graphics at the last minute. I like using quotes from a movie, TV show, etc. for my LJ cuts, particularly if they're related to one of my graphic posts. Since W&D has 4 parts (plus, it has so many great quotes), I had wanted to eventually include one quote from each episode for those LJ cuts. I had also wanted to put the last 50 icons (the artist's choices) in the order those scenes appeared in W&D, but again, I wanted to hurry up and post everything ASAP (therefore, they're in the order that I finalized them).
  
• Expect the unexpected...and regrets: I did more "hushed" icons than I had expected. Something that I wish I had made was an animated icon; icons #28 and 100 would have been perfect for that, for examples, but I had trouble with making them animated (that's why I put two different screencaps from the same scene on one icon each).
• Music references: I purposely used song lyrics for icons 4 (also the title of the song), 18 ("Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol; one of the assigned themes is All That I Am, which made me think of that song- and that scene), 27 (the name of a song, though I only thought of it, since I heard it in a commercial for diet TV dinners), and 64 (I'm familiar with that song by Randy Travis, but the song with the same name that I had in mind was by 8mm; you can hear the 8mm song in this tribute video).
• Television references: Icon #74 was inspired by a popular line/scene in the miniseries "North & South." Meanwhile, icon #75 was inspired by the closing moments of the season three premiere of "One Tree Hill;" the audio from that OTH part was used in a YouTube video that included scenes from W&D and other period dramas (I especially liked how that quote I used in that icon was paired with that particular W&D scene in this video):
  

  Click to view

  
  
  All in all, it was an interesting experience. In the future, though, if I want to make 100 icons for something, I'll have to wait until I have more much free time.